Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This study focuses on the state choice of how to treat child support payments in determining the SNAP eligibility of non-custodial parents. Beginning in 2004, states could choose to treat child support paid either as an income exclusion or an income deduction. States encourage child support payments by deciding to exclude child support paid by the non-custodial parent from the total gross household income at the very beginning of the SNAP eligibility calculation. The default, however, treats child support payments as an income deduction after the gross income test is applied and results in fewer non-custodial parents qualifying for SNAP than under the income exclusion.

Among households that paid child support, using Current Population Survey data from 2011-2018 we estimate that SNAP eligibility among child support payees would increase by approximately 33 percent if all states treated child support payments using the income exclusion rule. In terms of demographic characteristics such as racial composition and education levels, the set of child support payees that would be eligible tend to be more advantaged, on average, than current SNAP participants but less advantaged than those who would not qualify for SNAP.

While over time more states have chosen to apply the more generous income exclusion rule, most states continue to use the income deduction rule. Additionally, there are a sizable number of states that switched their treatment of child support payments multiple times in the last 14 years. Given that funding for SNAP payments comes from the federal government, the motivation behind state choices is not obvious and becomes the focus of this study. In this paper, we estimate a series of models to test different hypotheses regarding what drives state decisions regarding their treatment of payee child support payments. Namely, we explore the importance of fiscal considerations, ideological preferences, and policy diffusion as predictors of how states treat child support payments using state-year data from a variety of sources.

Our results provide important insight into what factors are associated with state decisions regarding social welfare program eligibility rules and will be of interest to a wide audience across the social policy arena.